Good to know. Thanks for sharing.
hm, like Microsoft? Where you can buy an Office license every now and than…
I think, it depends, one just can’t build business on small-licensees-only anymore
…and even that could be questioned in the days of appstores…
This is what I do. BYOL with FMPHost. Easiest set ups I’ve ever done, and responsive help when needed, which is almost never. I could save a little bit spinning up my own AWS instance, but it’s not worth (to me) the extra hassle.
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At FMK in Hamburg there was also said that there may be a chance to buy packs of e.g. 100 licenses and then split that to individual customers to get below the 5 limit.
But no idea if that meant cloud or on premise. I think FileMaker is well aware that they may miss out business with not offering server for 1 to 4 users.
That would be a huge change of direction Christian.
The whole idea of SAAS is the move from large upfront payments to monthly subscription type payments. If they want to play seriously in this space then firstly they need to offer monthly payment model and secondly the ability to scale from 1 to XX users at the push of a button - most SAAS providers also allow downgrades in capacity and users too.
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I agree 100%. Not just the granularity of being able to go from 1-100 users, but from 100 back down to 1. Even on a monthly rolling basis. This would help enormously in the Event / Festival space, where for 1 or 2 months of the year a large client may have dozens of staff, with only a couple working the rest of the year.
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Well, as usual FileMaker has a new pricing model and refines it after one or two years.
You remember FLT?
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They are well aware of the fact that a significant portion of their customer base is in the 1-4 users range. Setting the lower limit to 5 users squeezes theses customers. Given the fact that ‘producing’ a 1 or 2 user licence does not come at significantly higher cost than ‘producing’ a 5 user license, it is commercial policy that is not backed by any other constraint.
Some time before they moved to the new forum, their VEEP ‘Worldwide Marketing and Customer Success’ posted a customer survey that somehow demonstrated how customers enjoyed improved productivity from using FM. I had a look at the methodology of the survey:
It grouped customers in cohorts of size. The smallest cohort was 5-9 employees. This is an obvious error because selling 5-user licenses to these customers does not mean that all of them have 5-9 employees - a conclusion to which they jumped to in their résumé.
Providing that kind of work would make me fail in a statistics beginner course. I kindly asked for an explanation and - lovely as ever - never got an answer from the VEEP or anyone else.
This corroborates your observation: they are perfectly aware of the situation.
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Example yesterday. I quoted a customer on new solution with 5 users actually. He asked for on premises VS cloud cost. The on-premise solution was obviously more expensive upfront - Dell Poweredge solution, cloud backups, Windows server 2016, 3 year onsite 8 hr response. However by the time year two came round and the licence renewal stage it was already cheaper than the cloud version. Now this is a customer that already has onsite servers for other areas of the business - I felt pretty embarrassed when he asked why the cloud version was £1100 per annum more expensive than the on premise. Even taking into account the benefits of the cloud vs the maintenance and support for an onsite server I felt unable to even try and convince him not to go down the onsite route.
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An update on this. The client came back and said that they are unlikely to proceed due to the cost. They are looking at developing a solution in MS Access 
- they asked if I was prepared to undertake that work for them. I politely declined.
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Small clients seem to lack the ability to think strategically 
Yes, unfortunately it is all about avoiding cash out, no matter what the cost of ownership is.
All about cash flow and perceived benefits Cecile. Above all else, it is cash flow, nobody knows that like a small business.
agree, but …
Remember this FileMaker show case video with the pumpkin farmers. Did you know that John had to sell his Banjo and and some wage cuts had to be done so they could afford the FMServer license?
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True, if benefits are not perceivable, the proposal will not gain acceptance. I have seen cases where businesses spend considerable staff resources on manual data input and correction, having shunned automation for its upfront cost and lack of understanding of automation benefits. Often decision makers don’t have time to familiarise themselves with the technical intricacies of automation and it remains a black box to them while staff working in front of a computer is tangible.
LOL
As a small business owner operating in a country that was just escaping the worst effects of the 2008 financial crisis that then voted itself into the most uncertain trading circumstances for the last 3 years, here are our priorities:
- Ensure we can pay the staff and their pension
- Ensure we can pay our suppliers/overheads
- Ensure we can pay the tax
- Ensure we have have some ‘roughness’ in the bank to tide the business over if needed
- If anything left, consider what (strategic) investments to make for the future
- Us, the owners
There is so much press about greedy bosses, but most small business owners put themselves at the bottom of the priority list.
The market will decide whether Claris’s licensing and prices are correct or not.
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Greed is not the driving force of most small business owners. What I observe is a certain unwillingness to listen to advice. Not easy to do for someone who has to rely day in day out on his own good sense of business.
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We’ve seen it as well Torsten, all I’m saying is that what looks so obvious to us and you, is definitely not as obvious to them, and we never know what is going on in the background
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I don’t know of this story!
Seems like they understood the value!
And then there’s those which got burnt by a consulting firm that sold them a solution unfit to their needs or who paid for development work that was poorly executed.
The margin for error is really thin at that level…
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